by Aaron Crash
There was a long pause. “Yes…but…the nebula. We entered it a couple of hours back. It’s extraordinary. Bizarre. The debris we see now isn’t a nebula. You…” Another long pause, which put needles of icy fear through Blaze’s stomach. “You need to come up and see for yourself. It’s quite disconcerting and inexplicable.”
“Be right there.” Blaze spun out of the hammock and hit the floor running. Whatever Fernando had seen had jolted the Clicker in some way. And the bugs didn’t shock easily.
What in the hell was Fernando seeing?
SIXTEEN_
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Blaze burst onto the bridge, barefoot, in his old woodland cammies from his Marine Corps days. He hadn’t had time to button the blouse, but since he was in charge, he didn’t have to worry about anyone bitching at him for being out of uniform.
What greeted him through the central window defied explanation. Fernando and Ling were alone, Fernando at a workstation with the golden command controls and Ling operating a science terminal glowing blue.
Blaze shared Ling’s display, getting a view of the ship and the surrounding junk. And it was junk stretching out around them. Human, Clicker, and Meelah trash: metal, plastic, wood, coffee grounds, all floating around the neutron star, which was a frozen-blue, corpse-gray flicker in the distance. It was only about six miles in diameter, but it had the mass of two Terran suns. While small physically, the forces around it were staggering.
The flotsam was pushed out of the way by the initial point of their spacetime wave and then splashed behind them in the ship’s wake. They were still going about ten times the speed of light.
Ling spoke in a quiet voice. “The nebula itself is one light-year wide. That’s five point eight eight trillion miles. It is comprised of various gases and particles, nothing of any real concern. This debris field of wreckage is one astronomical unit wide and comprises the heart of the nebula.”
“Can’t be,” Blaze whispered. An astronomical unit was ninety-three million miles. “The Sargasso Expanse doesn’t have any settlements that big, and even if you combined every outpost on its borders, it still wouldn’t generate even a fraction of the garbage. No, can’t be.”
“And yet, it is,” Ling said.
Blaze used his display to focus in on a piece of floating something. It was a Mr. Coffee coffeemaker, the carafe cracked and used grounds floating around the main apparatus. Beyond it was the hull of a MAC-6 shuttlecraft, spinning lazily next to a Meelah mattress leaking Meelah leaves.
“Xerxes?” Blaze asked.
“Near the neutron star,” Ling replied. “His signal is solid. But there is something partially covering the dead star. It’s another Etrusca artifact.”
“Does this star have a name or designation?” Blaze asked.
“None. It is not a known celestial body, but as you know, the Sargasso Expanse has not been fully mapped because of the dangers with the pocket anomalies.” Ling gave enhanced images of the wreckage around the star. It wasn’t trash near the star, but space vessels. Large, small, old, new, everything from IPC attack ships to Clicker hive freighters and some Meelah explorators. Warships, cargo containers, colonist transports, all circling the blue-gray rotting star in the distance.
And somewhere in there was a demon who could control tech. It was clear—he was going to create monsters from those starships and throw them at the Lizzie Borden. Attacking him there was suicide.
Blaze triggered comms. “Elle, I need you.”
Her voice was immediate. “Sure, you need me. You just can’t say you love me.”
The gunnery sergeant winced. He had made a grave tactical error the night before. He should’ve given Elle exactly what she needed. He should’ve treated her like a thoroughbred racehorse, combed her coat, told her he loved her, fed her special oats. Instead, he’d tossed her aside like a plasma rifle with a defective core charger.
“I’ll do better next time,” he promised. “Just come up.”
“I’m already on my way. I see the space trash, which of course isn’t possible. Not that much of it, not this far out here. No way for it to get here. Remember that demon that possessed the girl on Central Dupage? She peed and pooped and spewed up all kinds of green goo. No way could her body produce that much fluid. What if Xerxes can summon up trash?” Elle had switched from hurt sister to focused hunter, but her words were coming quick, too quick.
Blaze’s stomach dropped into his bare feet. “Did you sleep, Elle?”
“Catnaps. Had a world of shit to do. But I’m fine. I used some of Granny’s go juice. The syringes are Terran silver. I have three total. Refilled the one I used. And damn, do they do the trick. Got my mojo running hot, Blaze. Even did a little tweaking to the flush routines. Booya!” She burst through the door, already suited up in her nanofiber armor. Her red and black hair was tied in a ponytail, and her dark eyes were bright. She looked good … Well, until you noticed the bags under those bright eyes and how her skin was a little too waxy. Blaze noticed three archaic silver syringes. The plunger flange and the barrel flanges were ornate rings. The syringes were stuck in special carrying loops on her bandolier of hydrogen shells and spell-component pouches.
He frowned at her. She smiled right back. “Running hot, Gunny. Good to go. We’ll sleep when we’re dead. Ling here didn’t sleep much.”
“But I move very slowly,” Ling said, “to conserve energy.”
“Hi, Elle,” Fernando clicked, and even his clicking seemed dazed and lovestruck. “So good to see you.”
Elle went over and kissed the Clicker on his mandible. “Good morning, Fernando. Good to see you, too.”
Fernando trembled and clicked a mile a minute, so fast that the translators couldn’t keep up. It came out as a garbled, muffled, ahhhhhhhhhhh.
It was irresponsible of his sister, but again, he was to blame. Blaze called Trina and Cali. “Hey, can you two come up to the bridge? Cali, your door is unlocked. We’re almost to Xerxes.”
Moments later, the two walked onto the bridge. Cali was already accessing the science station menus. Trina followed suit. The auditor was a quick study. “That’s garbage outside,” she said in wonder. “How can there be so much so far out here?”
“Yes, Trina,” Elle said brashly. “We’ve covered that. We think Xerxes craps space junk. But my brother is worried about the starships at the center of the space junk. We are going to be fighting some big-ass monsters out there. We need a plan.”
Trina paused, going over the visuals Blaze had just seen—scanning the derelict spacecrafts circling the star, which was partially covered by an Etrusca ruin. The star was tiny compared to all the stuff around it, and yet, the mass of the thing far made up for its physical size. That runty dead star played hell on astrophysics.
Fernando clicked, “Estimated time of arrival is fifteen minutes. Or should I stop the engines so we can plan?”
“Don’t you dare,” Elle said.
Blaze disagreed. “Yeah, Fernando, dissipate the spacetime wave.”
“Listen to me, lover boy,” Elle warned. “We need to get there and get this done. We know it’s a trap. Let’s just go and trigger it already and kick some ass.”
“Fernando, direct order,” Blaze said. “Slow us down.”
Fernando didn’t move. It was actually kind of funny. The Clicker’s mind couldn’t resolve what his heart clearly wanted: to listen to Elle in hopes he might relive the magical night he’d spent with her.
Blaze locked eyes with his sister. “Now, Fernando.”
“Don’t do it,” his sister said, eyes equally charged.
This was it. His sister had finally lost it.
The ship shuddered around them, and the junk stopped being blurs of matter outside the window. Like a boat coming to a stop on a lake, the Lizzie Borden swung to the side, and the wake of their wave rippled through the trash all around them.
“Thank you,” Blaze said.
“Uh, you’re welcome, Gunny, but I did not dissipate the
wave. One moment while I converse with Bill in the engine room.” The Clickers chattered with each other.
The ship lurched forward, gaining momentum. A ceramic mug shattered against the hull. Blaze turned his display gold and took control of the ship. First thing he did was raise shields. Now that they weren’t riding on the spacetime wave, the material objects around them weren’t pushed away but thudded against the ship’s metal directly.
A Clicker command console bashed into their shields and cracked in half.
Blaze saw that the SWD engine was inactive and that their auxiliary engines were also not working.
Fernando clicked, and the translation software struggled to keep up. “We hit a pocket anomaly which washed out our wave, but now we are being pulled toward the neutron star by Onyx energy. It seems Xerxes is pulling us toward him.”
On the wall, protective sigils that Elle had painted began to glow red, but in seconds switched to white hot.
“He’s trying to get into our ship, to rip it apart, to get to us. But he can’t. My magic is holding.” She whirled on Blaze. “It’s time to fight, big brother. You’re good at that. You, me, Ling, and Cali, we get on the starcycles, and we strike at Xerxes. Hit him hard. You’re right, he’s going to use those starships to build monsters of all shapes and sizes. I can stasis some of them, and you can hack through the others. Our fusion weapons kick some major ass.”
“Estimated time of arrival, five minutes.” Fernando shook his insectile head. “We are going faster than if we were riding a spacetime wave.”
“He wants us bad,” Blaze said. “Cali, I think Elle is right. Are you ready?”
Cali shook her head and tears dropped to her cheeks. “No, Blaze, I’m not. But I have to be, don’t I?”
His heart broke a little for her. “I’m sorry. But we need you.”
Cali closed her eyes, and more tears streaked down her cheeks. “Okay. Just…stop me when it’s over. Promise me. You’ll stop me.”
“I will, darling,” Blaze said.
Trina stepped between them. Blaze knew it was an alpha female move, but Trina did have the right he supposed. “What about me?” the auditor asked.
“Stay on board,” Elle said. “Help Fernando with the guns. We’ll need to use the fusion torpedoes. Bill can fly the Lizzie and help her stay in one piece. This is gonna get intense, bitches.”
Blaze sighed. “You’re out of your mind, exhausted, hopped up on God knows what…this is bad.”
Elle punched him in the arm, hard enough to hurt. “God doesn’t know what’s in my veins, but Granny knew. Do you know what this means, Blaze? I don’t need to rest. I don’t need to get all Ling spiritual. I can just give myself a little shot, and off we go. You wanted me to be a weapon, well, you got it. I’m unstoppable now. Let’s go show Xerxes he picked the wrong hunters to fuck with.”
Blaze didn’t know what to say. Part of him feared this change in his sister. Another part knew if she could power up with the syringes, that could change the game. And change it in their favor. He was torn.
“ETA, three minutes,” Fernando clicked.
Blaze kissed Trina on the cheek. “Cover us, baby. We’re going in.”
Then he and Ling were running to the weapons locker. Blaze shoved a gauntlet on his hand and snatched up Ugly Betty and his ax. Ling grabbed a nanofiber gauntlet, his fusion nunchaku, and a fusion pistol. He stuck the pistol into his pouch, being a marsupial. His plasma bow was across his back. They raced off toward the cargo bay. Elle and Cali were there. Elle had two of her fusion pistols strapped to her hips and the two fusion katanas on her back. The hilt of her wakizashi, the Japanese short sword, was clipped to her belt. Spacesuit armor covered Cali, and she had her bracelets. It was all she needed.
“Are your bracelets loaded?” he asked her.
She raised her arms. Each of the iron rings around her wrists had a hydrogen shell loaded into a housing underneath.
“Good. Let’s go.”
All four of the hunters ran to the starcycles. There were five total. Slender leather seats sat atop seven feet of gun and engine. A fusion cannon tipped the front. On either side were plasma guns. The back was a blue-fire engine, converted to use hydrogen shells. The minute their hands touched the handles, the nanotech in the bikes shaped to their bodies. They waited for a heartbeat, then two.
The ship came to a screeching stop. A quick check through his display and Blaze could see they were far closer to the neutron star. The spinning dirty blue-gray sphere was in the middle of two Etrusca structures. The top part of the ruin must’ve been a thousand miles long and at least five hundred miles wide, so it dwarfed the star. Columns or bridges, like prison cell bars, connected the top to a smaller structure underneath, maybe three hundred miles by fifty miles. He wondered if they had tentacles and faces like in the other ruin they’d seen.
Orbiting both the star and ruin was a sea of starships, every size, every kind, every structure. Nothing seemed to be animated by Xerxes’s demonic powers, but they’d seen how fast he could build his monstrous toys. Like a maniac with Lego bricks.
Fewer pieces of debris surrounded the abandoned vessels, but there was still the odd bit of junk: a monitor here, an old rifle there, a cracked plastic doll, its threadlike hair floating in the vacuum of space.
The dead star cast a corpse-pale light on every piece of junk.
Of course, Xerxes would run here. He was called the Necrotechnical for a reason, an archduke of hell, lord of the dead and garbage technology.
“I have visual on Xerxes.” Ling shared his display with his comrades. The P13rce unit, fully repaired, crawling with spiked fleas, floated in the center of at least six Paladin-class IPC attack ships.
“Looks like bait to me,” Blaze said. “He’s the cheese in the mousetrap. And I love me a quesadilla.”
“Let’s hit him,” Elle screamed. “Kick him right in the teeth!”
All four triggered their bikes at the same time. The nanotech ports in the starboard aft section telescoped open, and they zoomed from the ship. The nanobots then converged, restoring the integrity of the ship’s hull.
Xerxes’s voice swept through comms. “It’s been a merry chhhase, my friends. You hhhave to come hhhunt me, but you are not the cat. You have been the mice in the basement of my lord and master’s hhhouse. He hhhas sent me to exterminate all of you.”
Blaze laughed at the necrotechnical archduke of hell. “Xerxes, we might be mice. But we brought a wolf with us.”
Cali gunned her cycle and took the lead.
She’d opened her bracelets herself.
SEVENTEEN_
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The starships around Xerxes shifted and buckled, throwing rivets and support beams. Before their eyes, the ships were transforming, pieces sliding across one another, metal coming together in jagged, impossible ways as the archduke of hell imbued the wrecked starships with Onyx energy.
One of the IPC attack ships came apart in a spray of smaller figures all coalescing into six-foot-tall metallic dinosaur shapes with razor-sharp talons, as well as a vicious blade at the tip of their tails. Fifty velociraptors littered the space, dead junk for a moment until a crimson gleam ignited their eye slits.
Two of the other attack shapes clashed together, the metal morphing into a forty-foot-long tyrannosaurus rex, yet this beast didn’t have stubby claws. One arm branched out into a writhing steel tentacle and the other formed into a mechanical crab’s pincher six feet thick.
Cali, sped toward Xerxes, the nanotech on her cycle released her legs even as she shed her spacesuit as she started to grow. Her face had already extended into a point tipped by flaring black nostrils.
A Meelah explorator smashed into a Clicker freighter to form a massive body. The three remaining attack ships slammed down into the twisting metal. In seconds, the attack ships had grown into heads, their mouths consisting of blue-fire engine blasters. The three-headed, dragon-shaped beast had a dozen tentacles writhing under the plasma eng
ine mouths. The monster coalesced in front of Cali. She had grown to eight feet tall, and she rode her cycle like a skateboard. Her suit was gone. In its place was sleek blonde fur flattening to her powerfully muscled body. Her Human hands were gone, replaced by five-fingered claws as sharp as the nails on her lupine feet. Golden eyes blazed from her elongated face, and she was snarling silently, saliva bubbling off into space.
As a werewolf, she didn’t need to breathe, not in the traditional sense, but lived off the Onyx energy flowing through her. It made her skin impenetrable. She might lose fur, but nothing in the known universe except for Terran silver would pierce her flesh. Even those wounds, she could heal in nanoseconds. While there had been werewolves before the Onyx gate broke open, those had been mere animals in comparison.
As a werewolf, Cali wasn’t a thinking, sentient woman, but a killing machine, beyond thought, beyond fear, pure madness and bloodlust.
The bracelets glowed on her beefy arms. The nanotech had expanded to account for her enlarged wrists. Inside the bracelets were chunks of Earth’s moon. When closed, the bracelets blocked the energy in those rocks. When opened, the Terran moon’s power triggered Cali’s abilities.
Blaze watched Cali do her final trick. The hydrogen shells in the bracelets automatically emitted five strings of energy that wrapped around her claws, so not only were they razor sharp, but the fusion energy glowing in them could cut through almost anything.
She could eviscerate the three-headed metal monster in front of her.
Its round engine mouths fired lines of blue plasma energy as she punched right through the thing, clawing through its bowels and shedding pieces of metal, wiring, and exhaust ports. The debris from her vivisection whirled away from the force of the impact.
She burst out the other end as the monster spasmed around the hole she’d made. The fifty velociraptors converged on her, partially running, partially venting exhaust that helped them move.
Cali leapt from this one to that one to the next one, her fusion claws gashing the lizard robots apart. The lizards’ metal talons clipped her hair and removed fur by the clawful, but they couldn’t scratch her skin.
